Public Library Censors Nutritional Research

(OMNS Sept 18, 2012) Most medical
journals are easy to access on the internet through a huge electronic
database known as Medline or PubMed. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed)
This service is brought to you by the National Library of Medicine and
the National Institutes of Health. In other words, by your tax dollars.
Generally it is money well spent, until you go searching for high-dose
vitamin therapy research papers. Then you will find that you can't find a
lot of them. The reason is selective indexing.

"Selective indexing" is a nice name for censorship. After over 40 consecutive years of publication, the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine
is still not indexed by Medline. The Journal has just been censored,
again, after its most recent application. This marks the sixth time
since 1989 that JOM has been rejected for Medline indexing. The decision
is made by a review committee privately preselected by NLM. There are
no hearings. No public input is allowed.

What are the consequences of such
exclusion from Medline? In a nutshell, it stops the public from using
their computers to quickly access many of the scientific research and
clinical reports demonstrating the effectiveness of nutritional
therapeutics (orthomolecular medicine). It also greatly hampers
professionals from seeing pro-vitamin studies. Have you ever wondered
why your doctor simply does not know about vitamin therapy? Well, wonder
no longer. He or she can't find what isn't indexed. Since the vast
majority of journals indexed by Medline are pharmaceutical-friendly, and
nutritional research is censored, what do you expect?

If we want an informed public, we have
to have free access so we can all learn. That's the idea behind public
schools. It is the idea behind public libraries. The National Library of
Medicine is a public library. Your taxes should be helping you gather
information, and not paying a closed-doors bureaucracy to limit access.

"The National Library of Medicine refuses to index the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, though it is peer-reviewed and seems to meet their criteria." (Psychology Today, Nov-Dec 2006)

The Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine
has a review board of medical doctors and university- and
hospital-based researchers. Since 1967, it has published over 600 papers
by renowned authors including Roger J. Williams, Emanuel Cheraskin,
Hugh D. Riordan, Carl C. Pfeiffer, Abram Hoffer, and Nobel Prize winner
Linus Pauling. You should be able to access abstracts (concise
summaries) of these papers, instantly, via Medline.

Well, you can't.

As public libraries should be free to
rich and poor alike, so public access to scientific knowledge should not
be screened or censored. Our taxpayer-paid government owes the public
full disclosure of all new nutritional research
that can help people. Your taxes should not be used to fund censorship
in a public library, especially the largest medical library on the
planet. It is un-American. And unhealthy.

(Andrew W. Saul taught nutrition, health science and cell biology at the college level. He is the author of Doctor Yourself and Fire Your Doctor! and coauthor of four books with Dr. Abram Hoffer. Saul is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine.)

Action available:

You can also call NLM Customer Service at 1-888-FIND-NLM (1-888-346-3656). Remember to be polite, because, after all, they are the "World's Largest Medical Library." http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nlmhome.html

NLM's customer service representatives
are typically hired contractors whose knowledge about this issue may be
near zero. Scripted or form-letter replies are to be expected.

If you feel that your tax dollars deserve more than a canned reply, you may prefer to directly contact the people in charge:

OMNS would be interested in receiving a
copy of NLM's correspondence with you. If your comments are selected for
OMNS publication, your name will not be used. omns@orthomolecular.org

For further reading:

Four decades of papers from the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine are now online for you to read, Medline or no Medline, at http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/ The JOM Archive is an entirely free service, with no advertising.

Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA), Editor and contact person. Email: omns@orthomolecular.org
Readers may write in with their comments and questions for
consideration for publication and as topic suggestions. However, OMNS is
unable to respond to individual emails.

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